Given the current economic turmoil facing America and the world, the Great Depression is suddenly back in the headlines. It
goes without saying that the Great Depression was the worst economic
crisis in American history, and no doubt one of the worst crises ever
to face the nation—wars included. Beginning in 1929, intensifying
through the 1930s, and arguably not fully recovering until as late as
1954—when the stock market at long last returned to its pre-depression
level—the nation witnessed soup lines and employment lines, dust bowls
and closed shops everywhere, a plummet in national morale and the
response by the New Deal. The nation’s unemployment rate reached an
unprecedented 25%.

Anything so severe was bound
to have numerous consequences, foreseen and unforeseen. The rise of the
New Deal and its historic expansion of the federal government was one
such consequence.

Today, pundits, economists, and historians jockey to inform modern Americans of the causes and results of the Great Depression.One such result, we are told, was the rise of domestic communism in the United States. Or so we are told. And that is the subject of this paper.

~ ~ ~

It has been historically argued
that the American communist movement took flight in the 1930s during
the zenith of the Great Depression, when people were so desperate that
they were looking anywhere for solutions to their economic misery—even
to the farthest regions of the political left, i.e., all the way toward
communism. This historical narrative has had the long-term
effect—especially among the academic community—of generating empathy,
even sympathy, for much of the American communist movement: It was
understandable, the argument goes, that so many Americans “went Red,”
given the desperation of the times. The depression, historians
maintain, was a boon to Communist Party USA (CPUSA), a source of
recruitment, and American communism was essentially launched at this
time.

The rise of American communism—albeit never a very steep rise—thus, is linked to the 1930s and the era of the Great Depression.

This is a standard teaching in
American education, from the high-school level to our universities.
Unfortunately, it is not totally accurate; reality is considerably more
complicated. It is my hope that a more nuanced understanding will be
grasped particularly by students at Grove City College, where all
students are required to take the course, Modern Civilization in
International Perspective (Humanities 302), in which the Great
Depression is among the 20th century topics studied.

To be sure, the Great
Depression indeed turned some Americans to communism. CPUSA’s own
internal self-reporting showed increases in membership rolls in the 1930s.[1]That
is undeniable. As President Harry Truman was fond of saying, it was the
“silo of misery” and poverty that turned people toward communism around
the world. Addressing the poverty, and thus, reversing communism’s
advance, was one of the motivations for Truman's Marshall Plan in 1947.

Yet, the reality is that
American communism was launched well before the Great Depression, not
only in a time absent of economic catastrophe, but in one of the most
prosperous economic decades in all of American history: the 1920s.
American communists were railing against the evils of American
capitalism long before the economic severity of the 1930s—i.e., well
before one could even attempt to link the Great Depression to the
alleged ills of free markets. The Great Depression was simply a tool
for later exploitation by American communists once their organization
was up and running.

Little known to
historians, but now clear from recently declassified documents from the
Soviet Comintern, the American Communist Party’s own self-reporting
actually claimed a higher number of members at its founding in 1919,
when the American economy was doing just fine, contrasted with 1934,
several painful years into the Great Depression.

This paper examines the
start of the American Communist Party, just prior to the economic boom
of the 1920s, and well before the tragedy of the Great Depression. It
also underscores the crucial fact that the American party was
inextricably linked to the Soviet Communist Party, principally through
the Soviet Comintern. This is a reality that many professors still to
this day are loathe to acknowledge, and seem to prefer to ignore—since
it clashes with their preconceptions and ideological sacred cows—even
as the irrefutable evidence continues to flow from various archives of
CPUSA, the Comintern, the FBI, the Library of Congress, and more.
Finally, the paper concludes by highlighting another forgotten element
of the history of the American Communist Party in the 1930s: how the
party demonized the Roosevelt administration and FDR’s New Deal. For
American Communists, the Great Depression was always a mere propaganda
tool, one to be used to draw people closer not to the American model
but to the Soviet model.

Ironically, those now
long-gone American communists would have considered it another
propaganda victory to hear modern academic historians inaccurately
argue that their movement began not in boom times but in bust times.
That argument would have fit their template nicely. It is our task today to be real historians, to read the evidence, and to get it right.

The Comintern and Worldwide Revolution

Not coincidentally, the
American Communist Party was founded the same year as the Soviet
Communist International (Comintern). To achieve his “full-fledged
political project, world socialist revolution,” Bolshevik founder
Vladimir Lenin established the Comintern in March 1919 at a congress in
Moscow.[2]
The international objectives of the Comintern were self-evident from
its title. Even then, the objective was re-emphasized in other
preferred names for the Comintern, such as Trotsky describing it as the
“General Staff of the World Revolution.”[3]

In an immediate article for Pravda
on March 6, the last day of the congress, Lenin wrote that, “the
founding of the Third Communist International heralds the international
republic of Soviets, the international victory of communism.”[4]
In his concluding speech to the congress, Lenin proclaimed that with
the founding of the Comintern, “the victor of the Proletarian
revolution on a world scale is assured. The founding of an
international Soviet republic is on the way.”[5]
The Comintern was thus centralized under Moscow leadership, which was
to have “uncontested authority” over the other communist parties that
would soon be established all over the world, including in the United
States of America.[6]
Moscow, and by extension the leader of the Soviet Union, was to be the
conductor of the global symphony, orchestrating a literal international
association of national communist parties, all dedicated to the goal of
a global revolution—of worldwide communism.

Even then, though founded
in March 1919, the Comintern really did not get down to business until
a year later, delayed until the summer of 1920, once Bolshevik victory
in the Russian civil war—much more difficult than imagined—was a fait accompli and Lenin and his comrades could then focus on the larger prize: the world.[7]

As the eminent Harvard
Sovietologist, Dr. Richard Pipes, has noted, by 1920 Lenin had already
left no doubt that he envisioned the Comintern as (in Pipes’ words) “a
branch of the Russian Communist Party, organized on its model and
subject to its orders.” The 1920 Comintern congress made this clear,
demanding of its foreign delegates that when they returned home, they
would impose “iron military discipline” upon party members in their
countries, ensuring fealty to and “the fullest comradely confidence” in
the headquarters in Moscow. Beyond the parties, they were to seek to
take over mass organizations and especially trade unions in their home
countries.[8]

Significantly, the
Comintern made clear that members of foreign communist parties—from
Europe to America—who did not toe this line, who did not give total
subservience to Moscow, “who reject in principle the conditions and
theses put forward by the Communist International, are to be expelled
from the party.” This was the classic, infamous “party discipline” that
was a trademark of communist parties everywhere. Such discipline was
enforced within the domestic parties themselves, including in the
American party, where it took harsh and at times almost laughable
forms, more fiercely dogmatic than any religious excommunication.
Regardless, overall, subservience to Moscow was obligatory. The 1920
congress further added as a condition for admission and membership to
the Comintern: “Every party which wishes to join the Communist
International is obligated to give unconditional support to any Soviet
republic in its struggle against counter-revolutionary forces.”[9]

Here we see the pattern
established early on: members of communist parties around the world,
including in the United States, would see themselves as loyal Soviet
patriots. It would be Moscow first. Soviet interests reigned supreme
and held sway over those of any other regime. Befitting the vicious
regime that was its source, the 1920 Comintern congress evoked war
rhetoric as central to its mission, stating explicitly in point 17 of
its famous 21-point manifesto: “The Communist International has
declared war on the entire bourgeois world.”[10]]

The global objectives of
the Comintern were constantly reiterated; they outlived Lenin. The
entire physical apparatus for the Comintern, which included several
buildings and the radio school that served as its all-important source
for mass communication, was located exclusively in Moscow. Every
country with a Communist Party had a representative stationed in Moscow.[11] Among those was the American party.

Forming the Party in America

The Communist Party
established in the United States was expected to thrive on deceit. This
was clear at that first major Comintern congress in July 1920, which,
among the 21 requirements for membership, included the extraordinary
point three, which called upon communists in every country, including
in America, to create a “parallel illegal apparatus,” which, “at the
decisive moment,” would seize the day, rising to the surface and taking
charge of the revolution. When the moment was ripe, those comrades
would assist the masters in Moscow in “performing [their] duty to the
revolution.” There was no mistaking the clarity of these instructions
to American communists, who published these orders in the United States
in a document titled, “The Twenty One Conditions of Admission into the
Communist International.”[12]

The show opened in America
in September 1919, when two communist parties were formed in the United
States, the “Communist Labor Party” and the “Communist Party of
America.” They were organized at a convention in Chicago during the
first week of September. After a few additional mergers and name
changes, the communists by 1929 would form a single “Communist Party
USA” (CPUSA). From there, CPUSA became the political party for American
communists throughout the Cold War.[13]

It cannot be emphasized
enough that American members of the Communist Party saw themselves as
subservient to the Comintern and to Moscow. The American Communist
Party had been established only months after the Comintern had been
established in Moscow. The Comintern created an Anglo-American
Secretariat as its vehicle for micromanaging the American Communist
Party. A representative of the American Communist Party resided in
Moscow as the go-between or liaison between the Secretariat and the
American Party, supplying and transferring information between the two
and delivering orders from Moscow to American communists.[14]

The manifestations of this
control on a daily basis were constant from the outset: As Theodore
Draper reported in his seminal work on the American Communist Party,
when a new member joined the party in the 1920s, he or she signed a
party registration card inscribed with these words: “The undersigned,
after having read the constitution and program of the Communist Party,
declares his adherence to the principles and tactics of the party and
the Communist International: agrees to submit to the discipline of the
party as stated in its constitution and pledges to engage actively in
its work.”[15] This allegiance to the Bolsheviks was the mission of American communists who joined the Communist Party. They swore to it.

The degree of
Comintern/Moscow control of CPUSA was so total that when CPUSA picked
leaders for its own Central Committee, a list was first sent to the
Comintern for permission. These lists exist today, declassified in the
Comintern Archives on CPUSA.

Here are three examples,
from those archives, all from those founding moments in the summer and
fall of 1919, that are significant in demonstrating the level of
Comintern control over the American party and, in turn, the loyalty of
those party members to Moscow:

The first example,
highlighted as among the first documents in the Comintern Archives of
CPUSA, was completed in the summer of 1919, just prior to the official
formation of the party in Chicago in September 1919. The heading on the
double-spaced draft is “Soviet Power and the Creation of a Communist
Party of America,” a so-called “Thesis of the Executive Committee of
the Third International.” The three-page document carries two important
signatures: “For the Bureau of the Communist International, N.
Bucharin, J. Bersin (Winter).”[16]
This refers to Nikolai Bukharin, one of the famous Bolshevik founders,
and Jan Berzin, the later Soviet general and head of Soviet military
intelligence, the GRU.

The document begins by
establishing that the American party will not be independent from the
Soviet Comintern. It orders: “1) For the purpose of attaining an
immediate success of the revolutionary class struggle, of
systematically organizing it, of uniting and co-ordinating all really
revolutionary forces, and for the purpose of unifying principles and
organizations, it is necessary to form a Communist Party which should
be affiliated with the Communist International.” In the next line, the
allegiance is made clear: “2) The cardinal unifying and directing idea
should be the recognition of the necessity for proletarian
dictatorship, that is, Soviet power.”[17] The document commits both the Soviet and American representatives to the Soviet superstructure.

A second key document in
the Comintern Archives appears to have been issued from the Chicago
convention of September 1-7, 1919. It was issued on the letterhead of
the newly established Communist Party of America, at 1219 Blue Island
Avenue, Chicago, Illinois. It is a brief celebratory salutation from
the Communist Party of America’s executive secretary, Charles
Ruthenberg, along with attestation from present “International
Delegates,” Isaac Ferguson and Alexander Steklitsky.[18] It bears four simple sentences:

In the name of the
Communist Workers of the United States organized in the Communist Party
of America I extend greetings to the Communist Party of Russia.

Hail to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat!

Long live the Russian Socialist Soviet Republic!

Long live the Communist International!

The level of loyalty in this letter, to what and whom, speaks for itself.

A third document in the archives from the period is the November 24, 1919, application for Comintern membership—a pro forma
deal—by the Communist Party of America. The letter, signed by the
party’s international secretary, Louis C. Fraina, claimed a total party
membership of “approximately 55,000 members.”[19]
This figure may (or may not) have been exaggerated. Nonetheless, even
allowing for some padding of the membership rolls, it is considerably
higher than the 25,000-membership figure self-reported by CPUSA in 1934,[20] in the dark days of the Great Depression.

Many other examples could
be cited. This fealty would continue throughout the existence of the
American party and the Soviet party. As noted by Herb Romerstein, a
former communist who to this day remains America’s leading authority on
domestic communism, “from 1919, when it [CPUSA] was formed, to 1989,
when the Soviet Union collapsed, it was under total Soviet control.”[21]

The most telling evidence
of that Soviet control, which emerged only after the Cold War ended,
was the fact that CPUSA all-along received funding from the Soviet
communist government, beginning in 1919 and continuing until the
collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989. We now know this was not some
piddling sum; quite the contrary, it was a lifeline that kept CPUSA
afloat, to the tune of annual stipends of millions of dollars. The
funding continued for so long and at such a high level that it reached
nearly $2.8 million for 1980 alone. In the 1920s, when cash from the
USSR was not possible, the Comintern supplied the American communist
movement with an enormous sum at the time: several millions of dollars
worth of valuables—gold, silver, jewels—much of which was stolen by the
regime, and in some cases likely removed from sacred relics from
blown-up churches.[22]

The Daily Worker, the house organ of CPUSA, received heavy cash infusions from the Comintern from the earliest days of its existence.[23] The editor of the Daily Worker was approved by the Comintern. Soviet support of American communism was comprehensive, and had been from day one.

The significance of this
cannot be understated: a foreign government, with which America was
effectively at war, or certainly, at least, given the status of enemy
by the late 1940s, was funding an American political party, and that
party concealed the funding. This was illegal at both ends, from the
Soviet side and CPUSA side.

The Great Depression and the Roosevelt Administration

So much for the idea that
all of this happened as a result of the Great Depression; again, all of
this happened in the 10 years prior to the crash on Wall Street.
American “Reds” went red long before that.

Moreover, those communists
would see the Roosevelt administration not as an ally but an enemy, one
for both penetration, especially at agencies like the Agricultural
Adjustment Administration (AAA), and as a whipping boy.

To liberals and
traditional Democrats everywhere, the advent of Franklin Delano
Roosevelt was more than just a new president. The new man at the White
House was a kind of political savior at the most desperate time in
their lives and the life of their nation. But that was not how American
communists saw Roosevelt, and they wasted no time assailing the new
president and his New Deal.

The communists’ first
opportunity to rip into the new president came with May Day 1933, a
chance for them to somehow, someway brazenly denounce FDR as a fascist.
This kind of over-the-top, utterly unjustifiable language is evident
throughout communist literature at the time, where it was done openly.
It is also clear today throughout the Comintern Archives of CPUSA, as
copies of such vulgar material had been shipped to the Communist
International, almost as if to brag or prove to the masters in Moscow
that the good comrades on the American front were doing their best to
undermine the new U.S. regime. As proof of the volume of what was
delivered to the Comintern, this section of this paper draws its
evidence exclusively from that archive, which, even then, is a mere
sliver of what is available.

The anti-FDR front was
multifaceted, carried out not only on the streets of New York or San
Francisco, but in smaller cities from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania to
Rockford, Illinois. One flier for a May Day 1933 event at the court
house in Terre Haute, Indiana, proclaimed to workers and farmers that
this May Day would be “an inspiration for a UNITED FRONT of all
impoverished masses against the Hunger, Forced Labor, Terror and War
Government of the Roosevelt McNutt Dictatorship.” FDR had only been in
power for four months, but somehow it was clear to communist Americans
that he was pursuing a terrorist dictatorship seeking war and forced
labor. What was more, as the flier announced, were “the humiliating
tactics of relief agencies.”[24]

The Roosevelt
administration would have been amazed that it was being so harshly
criticized for doing such seeming "progressive" good in such a rapid
period so quickly into the presidency.

All over America, from
Terra Haute to Philadelphia to Chicago, demonstrations were held, and
ads were placed in newspapers, all exploiting May Day 1933 as a club to
bludgeon the new Democratic administration.

One ad, plugging a May 1
workers’ “celebration” at the Scottish Rite Auditorium in San
Francisco, insisted that “Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’, far from bringing
relief to Labor, has turned out to be a program which includes forced
labor for the unemployed at a wage scale of $1.00 a day.” Listing a
host of alleged economic crimes by FDR, the ad claimed the overall
effect was “reducing our real wages yet farther.”[25]

Curiously, this
celebration of May Day morphed into an attack ad on “the capitalist
class … preparing to plunge us into a new WORLD WAR,” with the heart of
the “danger” being an assault upon, of all places, the Soviet Union—the
only country directly mentioned in the ad. And these capitalists were
conspiring, “hand in hand with this brutal program of hunger and war,”
which, the ad had just noted, was a program of FDR and his New Deal. In
the next line, Hitler’s fascist Germany was invoked, followed in the
next sentence by the presumably similar fascist tactics against
striking “pea pickers” in California. The America of 1933 was cast as
dire, grim, and very unlike Stalin’s Russia (where, ironically, the
Great Purge and Red Terror were getting underway).

The message was clear:
America was speeding toward fascism, with a nefarious capitalist
encirclement that was ultimately targeting the Soviet Union. The ad
closed: “Comrades, Brothers: Let us unite our ranks for a fight to the
finish against this horrible system which has doomed over half of our
class to conditions of semi-starvation, which is sapping the very life
of Labor!”

These were the talking
points for fliers and ads around America organized by the communists
for May Day 1933. A demonstration at Union Park in Chicago decried
“Roosevelt’s forced labor camps”—when, remarkably, real forced
labor camps existed in the Soviet Union—and spelled out FDR’s alleged
true intentions: “Billions of dollars are b[e]ing spent for war. Yet
our relief is out.” Another promotion in St. Louis rang out against
FDR, the “fascist dictator.”

And yet another, promoting
a May Day parade and mass meeting in Minneapolis, was as transparent as
it was brutal. Under a giant heading to “DEMONSTRATE Against HUNGER,
FASCISM, AND WAR,” it accused the New Deal of seeking “a total
abolition of the workers’ right to strike,” of having “viciously
attacked” unions, and of developing “the biggest war construction
program ever known in the United States.” “ALL THIS WAS DONE,” screamed
the flier, for emphasis, “AS THE CAPITALIST WAY OUT OF THE CRISIS. ALL
THIS SHOWS HOW THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT IS MOVING HEADLONG TOWARDS
FASCISM AND WAR.” It ended with this final demand by “the workers of
Minneapolis:” “For the Defense of the Soviet Union and Soviet China.”[26]

Aside from ads, fliers,
and meetings, the communists kept up the propaganda campaign against
FDR in their publications. One such publication prominent in the files
of the Comintern—aside from obvious party organs like the Daily Worker—was The Working Woman,
which billed itself as the “magazine for working women, farm women, and
working class housewives.” CPUSA pushed to make the publication the
leading American communist publication for women. In so doing, they
took special aim at women in the Roosevelt administration, and
particularly Mrs. Roosevelt, who, remarkably, was not progressive
enough for CPUSA.

A case in point, copies of
which CPUSA sent to the Comintern, was the January 30, 1934, issue,
which led with a story titled, “Mrs. Roosevelt’s ‘Sweet’ Promises.”[27]
This article mocked Eleanor Roosevelt’s “boasted relief” as phony
“sweet charity,” a series of broken promises. It slammed two New Deal
projects, one at Bear Mountain, New York, and another in Morgantown,
West Virginia, as mere “publicity stunt[s] for the Roosevelts.” The
article, by reporter Sadie Van Veen, even zinged fellow travelers and
closet communists like Frances Perkins and Harry Hopkins, who, said
Veen, joined Eleanor and the rest of the Roosevelt administration in an
unsavory display of “contemptible hypocrisy.”

The magazine also included
a preview of the coming International Women’s Day on March 8, 1934, a
day that had been established way back in 1919 by Comrade Lenin and the
Third Communist International. This preview, written by Working Woman’s
Anna Damon, blasted the New Deal as the “Raw Deal”—the “new chains of
slavery being forged by the ‘liberal’ Roosevelt administration.” The
future, said Damon, was not in the “Roosevelt program of hunger and
war;” no, it was the “Soviet Union [that] shows the way.”

And yet, while the
communists were simultaneously trashing the greatest liberal president,
his administration, his policies, and his wife, they were working hard
behind the scenes to infiltrate the administration on behalf of the
KGB. The extent to which they did so would only be learned after World
War II, and is still being learned to this day, from the penetration by
closet CPUSA members to literal spies for the Soviet KGB, of which the
likes of Alger Hiss, the DOA and State Department official who ended up
at the founding of the United Nations and with FDR at no less than
Yalta, is only one example.

Among the most thoroughly
penetrated areas of FDR’s administration was agriculture, and
specifically the AAA. “No New Deal agency was more exciting than the
Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), a new wing of the
Department of Agriculture (DOA),” reported Sam Tanenhaus, New York Times Book Review
editor in his seminal biography of Whittaker Chambers. This new wing of
the DOA, bursting with a huge staff of 5,000, had been formed by FDR to
solve the farm crisis, and at a time when agriculture had long been
America’s most dominant industry. As Tanenhaus noted, the likes of
AAA’s chief counsel, Jerome Frank, had skimmed the top talent from Ivy
League faculties and Wall Street firms to create an elite intellectual
powerhouse ready to rescue America’s farmers. These men included liberals like Adlai Stevenson, Abe Fortas, Thurman Arnold, not to mention secret communists like John Abt and Alger Hiss.[28] And then there was Hal Ware, who would create an entire communist cell within the AAA.

Though no longer with DOA,
writes Tanenhaus, Ware “became a familiar figure at the AAA,” where he
virtually “camped out in the lunchroom.” From there, and much more,
Ware, by early as 1934, could begin his influence, having, as Tanenhaus
rightly noted, “assembled a secret Communist network in Washington,” a
cluster of seven cells or more, each with a leader who also belonged to
an “elite nucleus” that wielded substantial influence. Commissar Ware
and his comrades, hence, thrust their swords deep.[29]

How successful was the
penetration? Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, Harold
Glasser are just a small few of the more notorious, major KGB agents
who we now know were doing the work of the USSR.

And, thus, the communists
were slashing the Roosevelt administration from both sides: 1) on one
front, they were openly gashing the president and his policies in their
slash-and-burn publications, some of which were front publications not
honest enough to admit they represented the party; and 2) on the other
front, they were even more insidiously penetrating the administration
from within, looking for and finding recruits who would seek a
far-reaching influence in the foreign policy of the United States, from
where they could, consequently, change the world.

Conclusion

This is very much an
abbreviated narrative of much more that could be said. The point is
that the American communist movement first took flight in the 1920s,
not in the 1930s, with the Great Depression not leading people to
communism, but rather, vice versa, as the communists exploited the
Great Depression to try to lead people to their ideology. This is the
total reverse of how the era is typically understood and taught in
modern education.

While that consensus is
not confined strictly to liberal professors in the academy, it is true
that left-leaning professors—meaning, the vast majority of
professors—tend to subscribe to this school of thought more doggedly
than any other group. That is because such a view accords to their own
worldview, to their sense that capitalism is often brutal. For leftist
academics, the American communist movement was a natural response to
the harshness that they believed was often wrought by merciless free
markets. This template has an added benefit for their political biases:
it allows them to frame the communist movement as worthy of our
understanding, certainly not our demonization, and, thus, of allowing
those same professors to continue to demonize the anti-communists
(especially Joe McCarthy) who later “persecuted” these good, loyal
Americans allegedly merely practicing their civil liberties in a
democracy.

In fact, as this paper
shows, CPUSA members pledged loyalties that were not exactly consistent
with the American ideal. Their allegiance to the Soviet Comintern was
badly misplaced and not worthy of our sympathy. What was more, and not
only not worthy of our sympathy but not worthy of the sympathy of these
same liberal professors, was the degree to which these American
communists engaged in demonization. They demonized FDR and the New
Deal, and (not shown in this paper) would go on to trash other
Democratic Party presidential icons like Harry Truman, as they had done
to Woodrow Wilson. And while disagreeing and even denouncing those
policies is one thing—American conservatives have certainly done
that—secretly doing so on behalf of the Soviet Comintern is quite
another.

Put more bluntly, the
liberal academics who have long defended communists against the charges
of anti-communists need to finally realize that the communists were not
the good guys, and were certainly not their friends, nor even remotely
on their side.

In the end, the Great
Depression was an asset to the American Communist Party, but not in the
way that we have historically understood. The party took off literally
a decade before the crash; it was launched during economic golden
times. American communists saluted the red flag long before the Great
Depression of the 1930s. To argue to the contrary is, to borrow a
phrase, a classic Red herring.

[1]
This is clear in the internal CPUSA documents contained in the Soviet
Comintern Archives, declassified in the 1990s, portions of which are
housed today on microfiche at the Library of Congress.

[13]
The CLP and a faction of the CPA merged in 1920 to form the “United
Communist Party.” Later, the CPA and UCP merged under the name of the
former—CPA. In 1921, this group changed its name to the “Workers Party
of America,” which changed again in 1925 to “Workers (Communist) Party
of America.” The name was changed once more in 1929 to “Communist Party
USA” (CPUSA). Source: This is described by Harvey Klehr in his opening
to the Library of Congress reference book, Files of the Communist Party of the United States of America in the Comintern Archives.

[14]
A typical example was William Schneiderman, who, in the 1930s, was an
agent of the NKVD, code-named “Nat” (Venona transcripts), with an alias
of “Sherman,” and was later made head of the Communist Party of
California, where he would come into contact with individuals as
significant as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the chief scientist at the
Manhattan Project. Information provided by Herb Romerstein. The best
source for this is Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets (Washington, DC: Rgnery, 2000), pp. 258-68.

[20]
Communist Party USA in the Comintern Archives, Library of Congress,
Fond 515, Opis 1, Delo 4065. The figures were reported in a
confidential CPUSA document titled, “Additional Memorandum on Problems
of CPUSA,” under a section titled, “Building the Communist Party.”

[21] Email correspondence with Herb Romerstein, April 16, 2007.

[22]
The speculation on churches is mine. As for the sources on the funding,
there are several. The Library of Congress went public with
documentation on the funding in Revelations from the Russian Archives: A Report from the Library of Congress
(Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1993), p. 29. Other sources on
the funding include the two articles by John E. Haynes and Harvey
Klehr, “’Moscow Gold,’ Confirmed at Last?” Labor History, Vol.
33, No. 2, Spring 1992, pp. 279-93 and Vol. 33, No. 4, Fall 1992, pp.
576-8. Haynes and Klehr actually published receipts signed by Gus Hall,
head of CPUSA. Also see the two Yale University Press books by Klehr,
Haynes, et al, The Secret World of American Communism (p. 24) and The Soviet World of American Communism (p. 150). The most intriguing source documenting the funding from 1958-80, told through a remarkable story, is in John Barron, Operation Solo: The FBI’s Man in the Kremlin
(Washington, DC: Regnery, 1996), pp. xv and 339-40. This is the
biography of Morris Childs, who is discussed later in this book, along
with more details on the funding of CPUSA by the USSR. Herb Romerstein
has also reported on the funding in a number of publications.

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